Romancing the Dark Ages:
The Viking Hero in Sentimental Narrative
MARÍA JOSÉ GÓMEZ CALDERÓN
Universidad de Sevilla
Boletín Millares Carlo, núm. 26. Centro Asociado UNED. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2007.
Abstract: Among the cultural images of the Dark Ages one that has drawn much attention
on the part of literature is that of the Viking. Conventionally accepted as the embodiment
of Germanic racial heroism since the Romantic Period, the popularity of this character is
attested in numerous poems as well as in historical and adventure novels. This paper ex-plores
how late 20th-century popular fiction takes this process of cultural appropriation a step
further as the genre of the «hot historical» romance relocates the Norseman as object of
feminine erotic desire. The archetypal Noble Barbarian is thus transformed into a peculiar
Sensitive New Man, and sentimental narrative becomes a territory of negotiation for the
contemporary discourses of feminism and the new masculinities.
Key words: popular literature – romance – medievalism – Viking –gender studies – new
masculinities
Resumen: Una de las imágenes culturales de la Edad Media temprana que ha recibido ma-yor
atención por parte de la literatura es la del vikingo. Aceptado convencionalmente como
la encarnación del heroísmo racial germánico desde el Romanticismo, la popularidad de este
personaje ha quedado patente en multitud de poemas, así como en la novela histórica y de
aventuras. Este trabajo explora cómo la ficción popular de fines del s.XX lleva este proce-so
de apropiación cultural un paso más allá en tanto que el género de la novela rosa de tema
histórico redefine al vikingo como objeto de deseo erótico femenino. De este modo, el ar-quetipo
del «noble bárbaro» se transforma en un peculiar representante del «nuevo varón
sensible», y la narrativa sentimental se convierte en terreno de negociación para los dis-cursos
del feminismo y de las nuevas masculinidades contemporáneos.
Palabras clave: literatura popular – novela femenina – medievalismo – vikingo –estudios
de género – nueva masculinidad.
The Middle Ages have captivated the imagination of the subsequent ages
as they provide a convenient mirror for other historical periods whose self-
288 María José Gómez Calderón
definitions have been built in contrast to the medieval. In Brian Stock’s
words: «The Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to redefine it-self;
the Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admire itself; and the
Romantics revived them in order to escape from themselves. In their wid-est
ramifications ‘the Middle Ages’ thus constitutes one of the most preva-lent
cultural myths of the modern world» (69). In fact, this fascination with
the medieval past has been operative both in the traditions of high and low
culture; within the sphere of the popular, the appropriation of the Middle Ages
has turned out a most profitable device to sell not only cultural products, but
also goods as disparate as beer or wooden flooring.
The association with the medieval elicits connotations of authenticity and
naturalness, conferring on the products the prestige of tradition even when
the tradition invoked has been created ad hoc. Thus, most people’s percep-tion
of the Middle Ages is not based on historical evidence but on what
Hobsbawm and Ranger termed as «invented traditions,» in this case perpet-uated
through the popular genres1. As in contemporary appropriations the
stress falls on the legendary and the magical regardless of national borders,
the medieval past of modern fiction departs significantly from the «myth of
origins» central to the 18th-and 19th century nationalist vindication of the pe-riod.
Thus, for popular audiences the Middle Ages is a narrative niche for
fantasy where the historical and the invented –and sometimes the anachro-nistic
and the unlikely– coexist. Régine Pernoud denounces this inaccurate,
melting-pot character of the popular medieval in which the alluring and the
evocative replace historical accuracy:
Le Moyen Age fournit, à tous ceux pour lesquels l’Histoire n’est qu’un
prétexte, un terrain de choix: une période que le grand public ignore, avec
quelques noms qui émergent, Charlemagne, Jeanne d’Arc, l’Inquisition, les
cathares, la Chanson de Roland, les troubadours, les Templiers, Abélard, le
Graal, féodal qui rime avec brutal et les serfs occupés à faire taire les
grenouilles. Tel est à peu près le bagage moyen délivré par les manuels de la
classe de cinquième ou ceux de l’enseignement élémentaire. Si l’on souhaite
le corser, on y ajoute le secret des Templiers et le trésor des cathares, ou
inversement le secret des cathares et le trésor des Templiers. (126)
This picturesque reading of the Middle Ages as a land of fantasy has pro-voked
the interest of different forms of fiction narratives, notably
(pseudo)historical novels and films but, interestingly, beyond that the popu-lar
revisiting of this past has also proved a suitable vehicle for modern polit-ical
propaganda; John Aberth argues that, for instance, diverse medieval films
as Serguei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938), Michael Curtiz’s The Ad-
1 See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
CUP, 1983).
Romancing the Dark Ages: The Viking Hero in Sentimental Narrative 289
ventures of Robin Hood (1938) or, more recently, Kevin Reynold’s Robin Hood,
Prince of Thieves (1991) have proved effective means to voice the discours-es
of the Soviet regime, the American New Deal, and that of late 20th-centu-ry
neoconservatism respectively (3). As well as for political uses, the medi-eval
matter has also been appropriated by popular genres to address other
contemporary preoccupations as ethnicity, religious conflict, gender roles, or
family values.
In general terms, the popular imagination divides the Middle Ages rough-ly
into the categories of the «Barbarian Dark Ages» and the «Knightly Me-dieval.
» Among the cultural images of the Dark Ages one that has drawn
much attention is that of the Viking. Conventionally, the Norseman embod-ied
the archetypal European heroic masculinity. The figure rises in the con-text
of the 18th century within the revision of the Norse legacy, a cultural
phenomenon fostered by the vogue of Gothicism; this can be appreciated in
the popularity of works as Thomas Percy’s 1770 translation of Mallet’s North-ern
Antiquities (1756) and in his «Five Pieces of Runic Poetry» (1763), as well
as in Thomas Gray’s poems «The Fatal Sisters» and «The Descent of Odin»
(1768) and Magnus Magnusson and William Morris’s translations for the Saga
Library (1891-99). Progressively, the fierce and feared Danes of the medie-val
chronicles were vindicated as role-models within a process of rewriting
history that presents significant connections with the Germanophilia of the
Victorian Age. In this reading, the Viking was legitimated as a cultural icon
since it evoked military ethics that perfectly suited the contemporary dis-courses
of imperialism and racial propaganda. Besides, the figure of the Ger-manic
pagan echoed the confrontation of the Northern and the Mediterranean
civilizations, later reformulated as the conflict between Protestantism and
Catholicism, which in the 19th century provided a relevant cultural myth of
origins for Northern European nations2.
In this frame, the interest in the Viking bloomed in the genre of the his-torical
adventure novel between the 1830s and World War One, with exam-ples
as successful as George Dasent’s Vikings of the Baltic (1875), H. Rider
Haggard’s Eric Brighteyes (1891), F. Whinshaw’s Harold the Norseman (1897),
and Charles Whistler’s A Sea-Queen Sailing (1907) or Dragon Osmund (1914).
Likewise, in the United States the novels of Ottilie A. Liljiencrantz on the
2 See Frank E. Farley, Scandinavian Influences on the English Romantic Movement
(Boston: Ginn, 1903); Conrad Nordby, The Influence of Old Norse Literature upon English
Literature (New York: Columbia UP, 1901); Ralph B. Allen, Old Icelandic Sources in the
English Novel (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1933); Olive Anderson, «The Political Uses
of History in Mid-Nineteenth Century England,» Past and Present 36 (1967): 87-65; Alice
Chandler, A Dream of Order (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1970); Hugh MacDougall, Racial
Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons and Anglo-Saxons (Montreal: Harvest House,
1982); and Claire Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in 19th-Century British
Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990).
290 María José Gómez Calderón
viking discovery of America were much appreciated at the turn of the cen-tury.
These narratives had highly conventional plots including adventures in
distant seas, storms, battles, pirates, and mutinies, and viking protagonists
portrayed as noble heroes. Although on occasions the Norseman might be
rude, he was the epitome of the free man, his personality assuming features
of another cultural myth, that of the Noble Savage. Edward Bulwer-Lytton
celebrates this idea in Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848), a Victo-rian
historical romance which makes much of the Scandinavian heritage of
England:
A magnificent race of men were those war sons of the old North . . . they
plunged into barbarism the nations they swept; but from that barbarism they
reproduced the noblest elements of civilisation. Swede, Norwegian and Dane
. . . had the same prodigious energy, the same passion for freedom, individual
and civil, the same splendid errors in the thirst for fame and the «point of
honour.» (17)
The interest of popular fiction in the Viking re-emerges in the second half
of the 20th century with novels as Henry Myer’s The Utmost Island (1951),
Evangeline Walton’s The Cross and the Sword (1956), or Henry Treece’s pop-ular
series Viking’s Dawn (1956), The Road to Miklagard (1957), Viking’s
Sunset (1958), and The Horned Helmet (1963)3. Because of its appeal to wide
audiences, the stories and characters of this kind of novels were transferred
to other popular media and formats as the comic book or cinema. Among the
most relevant comics are the Marvel series Thor, by Kirby and Lee, and Thor-gal,
by Rosinski and Van Hamme, which popularized the image of the mus-cular
viking hero4. Regarding films, the most famous production is probably
Richard Fleisher’s adaptation for the screen of Edison Marshall’s novel The
Vikings (1958). The unforgettable scene in which Kirk Douglas, cast as Ein-ar
the Viking, walks on the oars of his longship as it advances towards the
village’s haven has become a Hollywood classic5.
3 From different ideological quarters, the Cold War climate of fear of a new armed
conflict produced a pro-pacifist, interesting revision of the Scandinavian past as W. H.
Canaway’s The Ring-Givers (1958), a novel revisiting the Old English poem Beowulf.
4 Prince Valiant, created in 1937 by Hal Foster, also deals with the adventures of a Scan-dinavian
character, Valiant, an exile from the Northern kingdom of Thule who seeks refu-ge
in King Arthur’s court. Although he is presented as a most noble Norseman, his figure
is more consistent with the knightly values of the Round Table than with those of the Bar-barian.
5 Another interesting Hollywood «viking movie» was Jack Cardiff’s The Long Ships
(1963), in turn an adaptation of the Swedish novel of the same title by Frans G. Bengtsson.
On its part, the more fantastic The Saga of the Viking Woman and their Voyage to the Waters
of the Sea Serpent (Roger Corman, 1957) is much indebted to the comic book aesthetics, as
is also the case of The Viking Queen (Don Chaffey, 1963). This film, in spite of its title, is
set in the years 60-61 AD and is vaguely inspired in British Queen Boudica’s resistance to
Romancing the Dark Ages: The Viking Hero in Sentimental Narrative 291
In the following decade the success of these productions was followed by
many other historical romances. Later texts were influenced by the revision-ist
movement taking place in the 1970s, when scholars claimed that the
Norsemen had been treated unfairly in history books; in Peter Sawyer’s
words, «once the prejudices and exaggerations of the primary sources are
recognized, the raids can be seen not as an unprecedented and inexplicable
cataclysm, but as an extension of the normal Dark Age activity» (202-03).
This new approach stresses the importance of the vikings as voyagers, dis-coverers
and settlers in novels as Michael Crichton’s recreation of Beowulf
in Eaters of the Dead (1976), Elizabeth Janeway’s The Vikings (1981), Jane
Smiley’s Greenlanders (1988), or Charles Barnitz’s The Deepest Sea (1996);
in the same line, Poul Anderson’s Hrolf Kraki’s Saga (1988) and The Wars of
the Gods (1997) present the violent societies of the Icelandic sagas and the
Scandinavian lifestyle in a more positive light.
Progressively, by the turn of the century the emphasis shifts from adven-ture
to the discussion of deeper cultural and ethical questions as the viking
narrative provides a suitable ground for the religious debate between the
pagan and the Christian. Formerly, the Romantic and Victorian revisions of
Norse paganism had accommodated it to contemporary moral standards; sym-pathetically
regarded as something picturesque and inoffensive, it was often
rendered as a natural cult close to the ethics of Protestantism. In later times
works as Harry Harrison and John Holm’s trilogy The Hammer and the Cross
(1988), One King’s Way (1995), and King and Emperor (1996) rewrite how-ever
these ancient Germanic cults in tune with present day religious con-cerns.
In fact, their novels assimilate early medieval Germanic paganism to
New Age and neopagan cults as Wicca, Ásatrú and Folkish Odinism6. A good
illustration of this point is the centrality of the religious matter in The Ham-mer
and the Cross; the action is set in the Danelaw by the year 865, when
the protagonist, Shef, son of a pagan Dane and a Christian Anglo-Saxon lady,
suffers an spiritual crisis. Educated in the Christian faith, Shef abandons the
fanaticism of Catholicism by entering a Norse mystic sect, the «Asgarth Way.»
This new cult is a blending of ancient pagan Germanic rites, marked by their
respect to the natural world and its magic, in combination with the Christian
sense of piety and love ethics:
The trouble is, he [Shef] saw in a moment of contrast, that the Christians
put their trust in rescue, and so do not struggle for themselves, just put their
the Romans. In the same decade appeared a curious Spanish-Italian production Eric il Vi-kingo
(Mario Caiano, 1965) which has the same title of Monty Python’s parodic Eric the
Viking (1989) directed by Terry Gilliam, with Tim Robbins as its protagonist.
6 See Brian Bocking and Marion Bowman, eds. «Contemporary New Age Religions in
the British Isles» (Religion Today 9.3 (1994)); and Michael York, The Emerging Network: A
Sociology of the New Age and Neo-Pagan Movements (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 1995).
292 María José Gómez Calderón
faith in their Church. The pagans struggle for victory, but they have no hope.
So they bury girls alive and roll men under their longships, for they feel there
is no good in the world. The Way must be between these two. Something that
offers hope, which the pagans do not have: even Othin could not bring back
his son Balder from the dead. Something that depends on your own efforts,
which the Christian Church rejects: to them salvation is a gift, a grace, not
something mere humanity can earn. (264)
In general, these novels tend to present the Viking’s innate sense of re-ligion
as a very positive spirituality which, suspiciously, incorporates a
(proto)environmental awareness that seems to respond more to modern eco-logical
concerns than to medieval attitudes.
As a result of these changes, the Viking is no longer presented as the
uncivilized Other, just a plain warrior hero with bellicose morals, but as a hero
with moral conflicts that may serve as a point of reference for modern audienc-es.
In his figure converge elements of the Natural Man matching the discourse
of contemporary masculinities as well as elements related to ethnic identity
issues; in the context of post-colonial, multicultural societies, the Norseman
turns out particularly appealing to audiences of northern European descent. A
further step in this process of cultural appropriation by contemporary fiction
is the turn towards the sentimental, a relocation taking place in the late 1990s.
The transformation of the Barbarian into a peculiar Sensitive New Man is
appreciated in the success of the romance of viking theme. In the last two
decades there has been a significant increase of novels of the so-called «hot
historical» variety focusing on the Viking as object of feminine erotic desire.
The most famous authors of these new Viking narratives, Johanna Lindsey,
Catherine Coulter, and Sandra Hill have even become «New York Times Best-
Sellers.» The titles of the works are clearly indicative of their approach to the
topic; to name just a few, let’s consider Johanna Lindsey’s Fires of Winter
(1980) and Hearts Aflame (1982), with their sequel Surrender My Love (1994),
or Heather Graham’s Golden Surrender (1985), Lord of the Wolves (1993), and
The Viking’s Woman (1993); even more suggestive are Robin Gideon’s Viking
Ecstasy (1993), or the ones by Sandra Hill, a true specialist in the genre with
two «Viking Series» already published and which include titles as Beloved Vi-king
(1994), Viking’s Prize (1994), The Reluctant Viking ne(1994), The Be-witched
Viking (1999), Truly, Madly Viking (2000), My Fair Viking (2002), The
Very Virile Viking (2003), A Tale of Two Vikings (2004), Wet and Wild (2004), Hot
and Heavy (2005) Rough and Ready (2006)7.
These novels greatly rely on cliché: simple style, simple plot, stock char-acters
and a happy ending; that is, marriage between the Viking and the her-oine,
as finding a husband seems to be privileged by most popular genres
as the great female quest. Another cliché applying to these works is that the
7 Her last work for this collection, Down and Dirty, will be published in October 2007.
Romancing the Dark Ages: The Viking Hero in Sentimental Narrative 293
authors of romance are consistently women. However, it seems to be the
product of a convention of the genre: often authors hide their real identi-ties
under female pen-names in order to reinforce the identification with the
target audience of female readers8. Besides, it should be taken into account
that although this is a most profitable kind of literature, the genre is stig-matized
by being «popular fiction» and therefore writers, due to cultural
prejudices, would not have their real names associated with these products.
As is typical of the sentimental narrative, the narration is built around
the love conflict: the impossibility of the union between the hero and the
heroine because the Viking is a «Barbarian Other» that shatters the wom-an’s
life. The Viking is thus presented as the enemy in two possible ways. If
the novel is set in the Middle Ages, the obstacle for the protagonists’ love
is synchronically delimited, as the characters usually belong to different peo-ples;
the lady is a Saxon, a Celt, or a Frank, and the mutual hostility of their
ethnic groups marks their relation as taboo. A second possibility is that the
narration is set in the present by means of the rhetorical device of time-travel,
and so the conflict complicates diachronically when the professional and self-assertive
modern woman falls in love with a chauvinistic, domineering, me-dieval
man. Johanna Lindsey’s novel Until Forever (1995) provides a good il-lustration
of this point. Here the Viking Thorn comes from the 11th century
to enlighten Roseleen White’s trivial life –she is a medieval history profes-sor–
and the heroine learns to love him even if this implies relinquishing her
modern woman’s principles of emotional independence and gender equality9.
But, in any case, both the medieval or contemporary protagonist feels both
shocked and attracted by the sexy and caring Viking who has came to make
her question her values. As we read in this novel, the Viking’s appeal is age-less:
«By the time his licking turned into kissing, Roseleen was a squirming
mass of sensitized nerves that reacted to Thorn’s slightest touch. And her
perception of medieval man was changed forever.» (181)
The «hot historical» depends on the construction of the «Other» accord-ing
to the contemporary definition of feminine identity. In this regard, Joan
Cohn points out that «romance satisfies –as it feeds– the forbidden desire for
male power and unrealistic desire for female love, and it satisfies them both
in the gorgeous figure of the hero» (42). Thus, the Norseman of these nov-els
is articulated as the object of desire for both the medieval or modern
women protagonist and also for the female reader. This is achieved by draw-
8 Often, these books include a short biography of the authors in their back covers where
they are consistently presented as happy wives and mothers as well as successful
professional writers.
9 Tom Holt’s novel Who Is Afraid of Beowulf? (1988) also presents the adventures of
History lecturer Hildy Frederiksen who, in the company of a Vikng war-band, arrives in 20th
century Scotland. However, here the stress falls on parody and there are no sentimental
or erotic elements.
294 María José Gómez Calderón
ing on the identification character-reader across times –that is, by appealing
to what in the novels is presented as the eternal feminine that joins both fe-males,
and by assuming that women of all ages have to face the same kind
of problems with men, that is, the eternal masculine. The rhetorics of the
genre require that the narrator voices the female character’s perception of
the conflict, as it sides with the heroine in her quest to win the love of the
Viking. Heather Graham’s text The Viking’s Woman (1990) offers a very rep-resentative
instance of how the fascination with the dangerous Other be-comes
central to the economy of the narration. At this point on the story
Rhiannon, King Alfred’s niece and a brave and independent woman, refuses
marrying the Viking Eric, to whom she has been offered as a «peace bride»;
but in spite of her reluctance, the woman’s resistance is progressively won
over by the Viking’s sex-appeal:
She tried to scream, to deny, to disappear in the very air. With swift-rising
horror she brought her gaze back to his eyes and was startled by the hard
mockery and unrelenting pride within them. There was a strange and savage
beauty about the man . . . It was in the animal-like grace of his movement as
he came towards her . . . Trickles of flame danced down the length of her
spine as she felt his touch, bold and hard upon her . . . as she felt his eyes,
daggers that ripped into her, and pinned her soul as his body pinned her form.
«What shall I do first?» he inquired. «Beat you or rape you?»
«Let me go –»
. . . His breath warmed her lips and entered into her. She was filled with
his scent, curiously clean and strikingly masculine and as alarming as his
touch. (177)
The heroine’s subjective perspective on this situation of abuse of power
is built around a positive evaluation of the Viking’s masculinity in traditional
lines. His «strange and savage beauty,» «animal-like grace,» and «strikingly
masculine» and «alarming scent» are perceived by the female as threaten-ing
yet enticing, and even his «hard mockery and unrelenting pride» contrib-ute
to seduce her.
The maxim seems to be that loving a Viking is always risky and painful
because, although the heroine sees in him the perfect embodiment of pro-tective
masculinity, in the first place she must gain his love to be protected
from him. She should employ her womanly charms in the process that I would
define as the «taming of the Barbarian,» in which the male protagonist is civ-ilized
and transformed into an integrated member of his society by the agency
of sentimentalization. This is in fact the position voiced by Kate Ryan from
the on-line bookclub «Romantic Times,» the self-proclaimed «definitive wom-en’s
fiction guide»:
If these warriors were so monstrous, why do they appeal to us gentle
romance readers? Because Viking heroes are the epitome of the alpha male!
Romancing the Dark Ages: The Viking Hero in Sentimental Narrative 295
As much as we proclaim a desire for independence, we do indeed fantasize
about being dominated by a fierce barbarian (the right one anyway!). Alan Alda
may be an OK mate in the 20th century, but he wouldn’t make a very good
protector in the ninth or tenth century. Women love the fantasy of
domesticating the barbarian; there really is nothing like «taming» a wild beast.
Just ask any romance reader—she knows how it should be done! No matter
how fierce these warriors, there weren’t many women who could resist the
charms of these Scandinavian heroes. For like Odin (Viking God of War,
Wisdom and Poetry) they had the mind and body of a warrior but the heart
of a poet.
Importantly, the Viking must never lose his good looks and physical mag-netism,
as the difference between the romance and the «hot historical» lies
on the attention paid to the sexual encounters of the protagonists through
the narrative. However, sex is regarded as secondary to the emotional com-mitment
to the Viking, which demands that women renounce their independ-ence.
In turn the man should, paradoxically, give up the activities that define
his «Vikingness»; that is, he must forsake sailing away from home and fight-ing
battles, in order to be happily «tamed» into marriage and caring father-hood.
A very good example is that of Sandra Hill’s The Very Virile Viking (2003).
Here the gorgeous Viking Magnus Ericsson travels in time with his nine
children to 21st century California; there he seduces a contemporary wom-an,
Angela Abruzzi, whose life seems to be pointless since she divorced: her
professional career does not satisfy her, and her real vocation, running her
family’s vineyard and winery, the Blue Dragon, is thwarted by financial diffi-culties.
She falls in love with Magnus in spite of her modern woman’s prin-ciples.
The following scene takes place during one of their arguments on ac-count
on the Viking’s overprotective ways, as he risked his own life to defend
the Abruzzis’ lands:
Angela glared at Magnus, who gazed back at her with utter innocence...
«I love the Blue Dragon, but I never wanted you to put your life on the
line.»
«Some times a man must be a man.»
She rolled her eyes. Is there such as thing as an adorable male chau-vinist?
(293).
The Viking thus is molded on the traditional masculine role of protector of
the family and their property. Magnus’s quest would be educating his viking
children in the frame of American consumerism and being able to fulfill his
Californian lover’s expectations: marriage, having one more child with her, and
staying at home with his new family forever. This big family, interestingly,
provides an idealized contrast to contemporary nuclear ones also in its mul-ticultural
nature: two parents belonging to different historical periods, nine
296 María José Gómez Calderón
viking children and one more Californian-Viking baby, plus one great-grand-mother
of Italian descent, all of them happily living together in the vineyards
of Napa Valley. To a certain extent, this text is but an idyllic and at the same
time parodic revision of Falcon Crest, one of the most popular television series.
Both the sense of parody and intertextuality are relevant in a more re-cent
novels which relies on the success these viking romances have enjoyed
in the last decade. In Jackie Rose’s I’m a Viking and I Protest (2004), a con-temporary
American man of Norse origin, Karl Gustavsen, founds an anti-defamation
league and sues romance writer Rose Jacobson for presenting
Vikings as sexy rapists in her works; that is, for just writing the kind of novels
analyzed above. As can be appreciated, the name of the writer character is a
pun on the name of the author of this text, a strategy that underlines the
comic interaction between literature and reality. From language to plot, this
novel makes fun of all the conventions of the «hot historical.» To begin with,
Karl denounces Rose’s unfair presentation of the Viking in her best-seller
Ravished by Ragnar (significantly published by Orgazm Books), and he does
it within the context of the politically correct:
«A rape contest!» he exclaimed «And because they are talking about our
ancestors, they can get away with it. What if she had written about two Black
men or Hispanics or Jews holding a rape contest?» Having originally phrased
that mentally as «Black men or Jews or Hispanics,» he had hastily re-cast it
into alphabetical order to avoid implying that he had singled any one group
out for the dishonour. (3)
This novel problematizes its gender politics: it is the male protagonist
who deplores the practice of constructing Viking sexuality in aggressive
terms, and not only because it renders all Norsemen as potential sexual abus-ers,
but mainly because it creates a myth of sexual excellence about them
to which Karl is not sure he could respond. Thus, the love conflict certainly
appears, although not when the Viking tries to kidnap and seduce the resist-ant
lady, but when the lady tries to seduce the modern Viking in order to
avoid being sued by him. To continue with the parody, the relationship be-tween
the protagonists evolves into a crazy battle of the sexes with many
erotic episodes that ludicrously rewrite the typical scenes of the Viking ro-mance,
particularly when Karl finds out a magical medieval runestone that
enhances his sexual skills. But finally –we cannot forget this is a romance
that stands up to the formulae of the genre– the heroine falls in love with
her enemy. In one of the most comic passages of the novel an infatuated Rose,
just to please Karl, even takes into consideration changing the title of her
next novel, Enslaved by Eric, into Liberated by Leif, Equal to Olaf, or Engaged-
In-A-Full-Consensual-Relationship with Torvald. In the end, of course, Karl and
Rose get happily married as her prospective next novel, finally entitled Seized
by Swen, advances successfully.
Romancing the Dark Ages: The Viking Hero in Sentimental Narrative 297
As this analysis shows, the turn-of-the-millennium revisiting of such a
well-established image of masculinity as the Viking in popular genres has
changed this icon significantly. It has undergone a process of transformation
from Noble Savage and racial and nationalist icon to object of feminine de-sire,
a makeover which updates the archetype to modern standards. How-ever,
although initially this seems to challenge the conventions of romance,
its transgression is just superficial as it is operated within the limits of the
traditional definition of gender roles. No longer a maverick raider and threat-ening
«Other,» but a Family Man and integrated member of the community,
the new Viking of these novels has become a defender of conservative val-ues
as long as issues as male authority and the father’s function as bread-winner
and protector of family and property are not questioned. The Viking
is never molded on alternative roles which, as for example the Nurturing
Father or the Feminist Man, can offer new possibilities for the definition of
gender relations in postmodern societies; as a sentimental hero the Viking
of romance, despite its pretended modernity, represents a backlash to the
contemporary discourses of masculinity as well as to that of feminism.
WORKS CITED
ABERTH, John, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film. New York: Rout-ledge,
2003.
BULWER-LYTTON, Edgard, Harold, the Last of the Anglo-Saxon Kings. London: (1848)
OUP, 1908.
COHN, Joan, Romance and the Erotics of Property: Mass-Market Fiction for Women.
Dirham: Duke UP, 1988.
GRAHAM, Heather, The Viking’s Woman. New York: Dell, 1990.
HARRISON, Harry, and John Holmes, The Hammer and the Cross. New York: Tor,
1993.
HILL, Sandra, The Very Virile Viking. New York: Leisure, 2003.
LINDSEY, Johanna, Until Forever. New York: Avon, 1995.
PERNOUD, Régine, Pour en finir avec le Moyen Age. Paris: Seuil, 1977.
ROSE, Jackie, I’m a Viking and I Protest. eXtasy / Zumaya. 2004. <http://www.
zumayapublications.com>.
RYAN, Kate, «Vikings.» Romantic Times.» 1997. <http://www.romantictimes. com/>.
SAWYER, Peter, The Age of the Vikings. London: Edward Arnold, 1971.
STOCK, Brian, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past. Philadelphia: U of Pen-nsylvania
P, 1990.

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Romancing the Dark Ages:
The Viking Hero in Sentimental Narrative
MARÍA JOSÉ GÓMEZ CALDERÓN
Universidad de Sevilla
Boletín Millares Carlo, núm. 26. Centro Asociado UNED. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2007.
Abstract: Among the cultural images of the Dark Ages one that has drawn much attention
on the part of literature is that of the Viking. Conventionally accepted as the embodiment
of Germanic racial heroism since the Romantic Period, the popularity of this character is
attested in numerous poems as well as in historical and adventure novels. This paper ex-plores
how late 20th-century popular fiction takes this process of cultural appropriation a step
further as the genre of the «hot historical» romance relocates the Norseman as object of
feminine erotic desire. The archetypal Noble Barbarian is thus transformed into a peculiar
Sensitive New Man, and sentimental narrative becomes a territory of negotiation for the
contemporary discourses of feminism and the new masculinities.
Key words: popular literature – romance – medievalism – Viking –gender studies – new
masculinities
Resumen: Una de las imágenes culturales de la Edad Media temprana que ha recibido ma-yor
atención por parte de la literatura es la del vikingo. Aceptado convencionalmente como
la encarnación del heroísmo racial germánico desde el Romanticismo, la popularidad de este
personaje ha quedado patente en multitud de poemas, así como en la novela histórica y de
aventuras. Este trabajo explora cómo la ficción popular de fines del s.XX lleva este proce-so
de apropiación cultural un paso más allá en tanto que el género de la novela rosa de tema
histórico redefine al vikingo como objeto de deseo erótico femenino. De este modo, el ar-quetipo
del «noble bárbaro» se transforma en un peculiar representante del «nuevo varón
sensible», y la narrativa sentimental se convierte en terreno de negociación para los dis-cursos
del feminismo y de las nuevas masculinidades contemporáneos.
Palabras clave: literatura popular – novela femenina – medievalismo – vikingo –estudios
de género – nueva masculinidad.
The Middle Ages have captivated the imagination of the subsequent ages
as they provide a convenient mirror for other historical periods whose self-
288 María José Gómez Calderón
definitions have been built in contrast to the medieval. In Brian Stock’s
words: «The Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to redefine it-self;
the Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admire itself; and the
Romantics revived them in order to escape from themselves. In their wid-est
ramifications ‘the Middle Ages’ thus constitutes one of the most preva-lent
cultural myths of the modern world» (69). In fact, this fascination with
the medieval past has been operative both in the traditions of high and low
culture; within the sphere of the popular, the appropriation of the Middle Ages
has turned out a most profitable device to sell not only cultural products, but
also goods as disparate as beer or wooden flooring.
The association with the medieval elicits connotations of authenticity and
naturalness, conferring on the products the prestige of tradition even when
the tradition invoked has been created ad hoc. Thus, most people’s percep-tion
of the Middle Ages is not based on historical evidence but on what
Hobsbawm and Ranger termed as «invented traditions,» in this case perpet-uated
through the popular genres1. As in contemporary appropriations the
stress falls on the legendary and the magical regardless of national borders,
the medieval past of modern fiction departs significantly from the «myth of
origins» central to the 18th-and 19th century nationalist vindication of the pe-riod.
Thus, for popular audiences the Middle Ages is a narrative niche for
fantasy where the historical and the invented –and sometimes the anachro-nistic
and the unlikely– coexist. Régine Pernoud denounces this inaccurate,
melting-pot character of the popular medieval in which the alluring and the
evocative replace historical accuracy:
Le Moyen Age fournit, à tous ceux pour lesquels l’Histoire n’est qu’un
prétexte, un terrain de choix: une période que le grand public ignore, avec
quelques noms qui émergent, Charlemagne, Jeanne d’Arc, l’Inquisition, les
cathares, la Chanson de Roland, les troubadours, les Templiers, Abélard, le
Graal, féodal qui rime avec brutal et les serfs occupés à faire taire les
grenouilles. Tel est à peu près le bagage moyen délivré par les manuels de la
classe de cinquième ou ceux de l’enseignement élémentaire. Si l’on souhaite
le corser, on y ajoute le secret des Templiers et le trésor des cathares, ou
inversement le secret des cathares et le trésor des Templiers. (126)
This picturesque reading of the Middle Ages as a land of fantasy has pro-voked
the interest of different forms of fiction narratives, notably
(pseudo)historical novels and films but, interestingly, beyond that the popu-lar
revisiting of this past has also proved a suitable vehicle for modern polit-ical
propaganda; John Aberth argues that, for instance, diverse medieval films
as Serguei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938), Michael Curtiz’s The Ad-
1 See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
CUP, 1983).
Romancing the Dark Ages: The Viking Hero in Sentimental Narrative 289
ventures of Robin Hood (1938) or, more recently, Kevin Reynold’s Robin Hood,
Prince of Thieves (1991) have proved effective means to voice the discours-es
of the Soviet regime, the American New Deal, and that of late 20th-centu-ry
neoconservatism respectively (3). As well as for political uses, the medi-eval
matter has also been appropriated by popular genres to address other
contemporary preoccupations as ethnicity, religious conflict, gender roles, or
family values.
In general terms, the popular imagination divides the Middle Ages rough-ly
into the categories of the «Barbarian Dark Ages» and the «Knightly Me-dieval.
» Among the cultural images of the Dark Ages one that has drawn
much attention is that of the Viking. Conventionally, the Norseman embod-ied
the archetypal European heroic masculinity. The figure rises in the con-text
of the 18th century within the revision of the Norse legacy, a cultural
phenomenon fostered by the vogue of Gothicism; this can be appreciated in
the popularity of works as Thomas Percy’s 1770 translation of Mallet’s North-ern
Antiquities (1756) and in his «Five Pieces of Runic Poetry» (1763), as well
as in Thomas Gray’s poems «The Fatal Sisters» and «The Descent of Odin»
(1768) and Magnus Magnusson and William Morris’s translations for the Saga
Library (1891-99). Progressively, the fierce and feared Danes of the medie-val
chronicles were vindicated as role-models within a process of rewriting
history that presents significant connections with the Germanophilia of the
Victorian Age. In this reading, the Viking was legitimated as a cultural icon
since it evoked military ethics that perfectly suited the contemporary dis-courses
of imperialism and racial propaganda. Besides, the figure of the Ger-manic
pagan echoed the confrontation of the Northern and the Mediterranean
civilizations, later reformulated as the conflict between Protestantism and
Catholicism, which in the 19th century provided a relevant cultural myth of
origins for Northern European nations2.
In this frame, the interest in the Viking bloomed in the genre of the his-torical
adventure novel between the 1830s and World War One, with exam-ples
as successful as George Dasent’s Vikings of the Baltic (1875), H. Rider
Haggard’s Eric Brighteyes (1891), F. Whinshaw’s Harold the Norseman (1897),
and Charles Whistler’s A Sea-Queen Sailing (1907) or Dragon Osmund (1914).
Likewise, in the United States the novels of Ottilie A. Liljiencrantz on the
2 See Frank E. Farley, Scandinavian Influences on the English Romantic Movement
(Boston: Ginn, 1903); Conrad Nordby, The Influence of Old Norse Literature upon English
Literature (New York: Columbia UP, 1901); Ralph B. Allen, Old Icelandic Sources in the
English Novel (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1933); Olive Anderson, «The Political Uses
of History in Mid-Nineteenth Century England,» Past and Present 36 (1967): 87-65; Alice
Chandler, A Dream of Order (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1970); Hugh MacDougall, Racial
Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons and Anglo-Saxons (Montreal: Harvest House,
1982); and Claire Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in 19th-Century British
Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990).
290 María José Gómez Calderón
viking discovery of America were much appreciated at the turn of the cen-tury.
These narratives had highly conventional plots including adventures in
distant seas, storms, battles, pirates, and mutinies, and viking protagonists
portrayed as noble heroes. Although on occasions the Norseman might be
rude, he was the epitome of the free man, his personality assuming features
of another cultural myth, that of the Noble Savage. Edward Bulwer-Lytton
celebrates this idea in Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848), a Victo-rian
historical romance which makes much of the Scandinavian heritage of
England:
A magnificent race of men were those war sons of the old North . . . they
plunged into barbarism the nations they swept; but from that barbarism they
reproduced the noblest elements of civilisation. Swede, Norwegian and Dane
. . . had the same prodigious energy, the same passion for freedom, individual
and civil, the same splendid errors in the thirst for fame and the «point of
honour.» (17)
The interest of popular fiction in the Viking re-emerges in the second half
of the 20th century with novels as Henry Myer’s The Utmost Island (1951),
Evangeline Walton’s The Cross and the Sword (1956), or Henry Treece’s pop-ular
series Viking’s Dawn (1956), The Road to Miklagard (1957), Viking’s
Sunset (1958), and The Horned Helmet (1963)3. Because of its appeal to wide
audiences, the stories and characters of this kind of novels were transferred
to other popular media and formats as the comic book or cinema. Among the
most relevant comics are the Marvel series Thor, by Kirby and Lee, and Thor-gal,
by Rosinski and Van Hamme, which popularized the image of the mus-cular
viking hero4. Regarding films, the most famous production is probably
Richard Fleisher’s adaptation for the screen of Edison Marshall’s novel The
Vikings (1958). The unforgettable scene in which Kirk Douglas, cast as Ein-ar
the Viking, walks on the oars of his longship as it advances towards the
village’s haven has become a Hollywood classic5.
3 From different ideological quarters, the Cold War climate of fear of a new armed
conflict produced a pro-pacifist, interesting revision of the Scandinavian past as W. H.
Canaway’s The Ring-Givers (1958), a novel revisiting the Old English poem Beowulf.
4 Prince Valiant, created in 1937 by Hal Foster, also deals with the adventures of a Scan-dinavian
character, Valiant, an exile from the Northern kingdom of Thule who seeks refu-ge
in King Arthur’s court. Although he is presented as a most noble Norseman, his figure
is more consistent with the knightly values of the Round Table than with those of the Bar-barian.
5 Another interesting Hollywood «viking movie» was Jack Cardiff’s The Long Ships
(1963), in turn an adaptation of the Swedish novel of the same title by Frans G. Bengtsson.
On its part, the more fantastic The Saga of the Viking Woman and their Voyage to the Waters
of the Sea Serpent (Roger Corman, 1957) is much indebted to the comic book aesthetics, as
is also the case of The Viking Queen (Don Chaffey, 1963). This film, in spite of its title, is
set in the years 60-61 AD and is vaguely inspired in British Queen Boudica’s resistance to
Romancing the Dark Ages: The Viking Hero in Sentimental Narrative 291
In the following decade the success of these productions was followed by
many other historical romances. Later texts were influenced by the revision-ist
movement taking place in the 1970s, when scholars claimed that the
Norsemen had been treated unfairly in history books; in Peter Sawyer’s
words, «once the prejudices and exaggerations of the primary sources are
recognized, the raids can be seen not as an unprecedented and inexplicable
cataclysm, but as an extension of the normal Dark Age activity» (202-03).
This new approach stresses the importance of the vikings as voyagers, dis-coverers
and settlers in novels as Michael Crichton’s recreation of Beowulf
in Eaters of the Dead (1976), Elizabeth Janeway’s The Vikings (1981), Jane
Smiley’s Greenlanders (1988), or Charles Barnitz’s The Deepest Sea (1996);
in the same line, Poul Anderson’s Hrolf Kraki’s Saga (1988) and The Wars of
the Gods (1997) present the violent societies of the Icelandic sagas and the
Scandinavian lifestyle in a more positive light.
Progressively, by the turn of the century the emphasis shifts from adven-ture
to the discussion of deeper cultural and ethical questions as the viking
narrative provides a suitable ground for the religious debate between the
pagan and the Christian. Formerly, the Romantic and Victorian revisions of
Norse paganism had accommodated it to contemporary moral standards; sym-pathetically
regarded as something picturesque and inoffensive, it was often
rendered as a natural cult close to the ethics of Protestantism. In later times
works as Harry Harrison and John Holm’s trilogy The Hammer and the Cross
(1988), One King’s Way (1995), and King and Emperor (1996) rewrite how-ever
these ancient Germanic cults in tune with present day religious con-cerns.
In fact, their novels assimilate early medieval Germanic paganism to
New Age and neopagan cults as Wicca, Ásatrú and Folkish Odinism6. A good
illustration of this point is the centrality of the religious matter in The Ham-mer
and the Cross; the action is set in the Danelaw by the year 865, when
the protagonist, Shef, son of a pagan Dane and a Christian Anglo-Saxon lady,
suffers an spiritual crisis. Educated in the Christian faith, Shef abandons the
fanaticism of Catholicism by entering a Norse mystic sect, the «Asgarth Way.»
This new cult is a blending of ancient pagan Germanic rites, marked by their
respect to the natural world and its magic, in combination with the Christian
sense of piety and love ethics:
The trouble is, he [Shef] saw in a moment of contrast, that the Christians
put their trust in rescue, and so do not struggle for themselves, just put their
the Romans. In the same decade appeared a curious Spanish-Italian production Eric il Vi-kingo
(Mario Caiano, 1965) which has the same title of Monty Python’s parodic Eric the
Viking (1989) directed by Terry Gilliam, with Tim Robbins as its protagonist.
6 See Brian Bocking and Marion Bowman, eds. «Contemporary New Age Religions in
the British Isles» (Religion Today 9.3 (1994)); and Michael York, The Emerging Network: A
Sociology of the New Age and Neo-Pagan Movements (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 1995).
292 María José Gómez Calderón
faith in their Church. The pagans struggle for victory, but they have no hope.
So they bury girls alive and roll men under their longships, for they feel there
is no good in the world. The Way must be between these two. Something that
offers hope, which the pagans do not have: even Othin could not bring back
his son Balder from the dead. Something that depends on your own efforts,
which the Christian Church rejects: to them salvation is a gift, a grace, not
something mere humanity can earn. (264)
In general, these novels tend to present the Viking’s innate sense of re-ligion
as a very positive spirituality which, suspiciously, incorporates a
(proto)environmental awareness that seems to respond more to modern eco-logical
concerns than to medieval attitudes.
As a result of these changes, the Viking is no longer presented as the
uncivilized Other, just a plain warrior hero with bellicose morals, but as a hero
with moral conflicts that may serve as a point of reference for modern audienc-es.
In his figure converge elements of the Natural Man matching the discourse
of contemporary masculinities as well as elements related to ethnic identity
issues; in the context of post-colonial, multicultural societies, the Norseman
turns out particularly appealing to audiences of northern European descent. A
further step in this process of cultural appropriation by contemporary fiction
is the turn towards the sentimental, a relocation taking place in the late 1990s.
The transformation of the Barbarian into a peculiar Sensitive New Man is
appreciated in the success of the romance of viking theme. In the last two
decades there has been a significant increase of novels of the so-called «hot
historical» variety focusing on the Viking as object of feminine erotic desire.
The most famous authors of these new Viking narratives, Johanna Lindsey,
Catherine Coulter, and Sandra Hill have even become «New York Times Best-
Sellers.» The titles of the works are clearly indicative of their approach to the
topic; to name just a few, let’s consider Johanna Lindsey’s Fires of Winter
(1980) and Hearts Aflame (1982), with their sequel Surrender My Love (1994),
or Heather Graham’s Golden Surrender (1985), Lord of the Wolves (1993), and
The Viking’s Woman (1993); even more suggestive are Robin Gideon’s Viking
Ecstasy (1993), or the ones by Sandra Hill, a true specialist in the genre with
two «Viking Series» already published and which include titles as Beloved Vi-king
(1994), Viking’s Prize (1994), The Reluctant Viking ne(1994), The Be-witched
Viking (1999), Truly, Madly Viking (2000), My Fair Viking (2002), The
Very Virile Viking (2003), A Tale of Two Vikings (2004), Wet and Wild (2004), Hot
and Heavy (2005) Rough and Ready (2006)7.
These novels greatly rely on cliché: simple style, simple plot, stock char-acters
and a happy ending; that is, marriage between the Viking and the her-oine,
as finding a husband seems to be privileged by most popular genres
as the great female quest. Another cliché applying to these works is that the
7 Her last work for this collection, Down and Dirty, will be published in October 2007.
Romancing the Dark Ages: The Viking Hero in Sentimental Narrative 293
authors of romance are consistently women. However, it seems to be the
product of a convention of the genre: often authors hide their real identi-ties
under female pen-names in order to reinforce the identification with the
target audience of female readers8. Besides, it should be taken into account
that although this is a most profitable kind of literature, the genre is stig-matized
by being «popular fiction» and therefore writers, due to cultural
prejudices, would not have their real names associated with these products.
As is typical of the sentimental narrative, the narration is built around
the love conflict: the impossibility of the union between the hero and the
heroine because the Viking is a «Barbarian Other» that shatters the wom-an’s
life. The Viking is thus presented as the enemy in two possible ways. If
the novel is set in the Middle Ages, the obstacle for the protagonists’ love
is synchronically delimited, as the characters usually belong to different peo-ples;
the lady is a Saxon, a Celt, or a Frank, and the mutual hostility of their
ethnic groups marks their relation as taboo. A second possibility is that the
narration is set in the present by means of the rhetorical device of time-travel,
and so the conflict complicates diachronically when the professional and self-assertive
modern woman falls in love with a chauvinistic, domineering, me-dieval
man. Johanna Lindsey’s novel Until Forever (1995) provides a good il-lustration
of this point. Here the Viking Thorn comes from the 11th century
to enlighten Roseleen White’s trivial life –she is a medieval history profes-sor–
and the heroine learns to love him even if this implies relinquishing her
modern woman’s principles of emotional independence and gender equality9.
But, in any case, both the medieval or contemporary protagonist feels both
shocked and attracted by the sexy and caring Viking who has came to make
her question her values. As we read in this novel, the Viking’s appeal is age-less:
«By the time his licking turned into kissing, Roseleen was a squirming
mass of sensitized nerves that reacted to Thorn’s slightest touch. And her
perception of medieval man was changed forever.» (181)
The «hot historical» depends on the construction of the «Other» accord-ing
to the contemporary definition of feminine identity. In this regard, Joan
Cohn points out that «romance satisfies –as it feeds– the forbidden desire for
male power and unrealistic desire for female love, and it satisfies them both
in the gorgeous figure of the hero» (42). Thus, the Norseman of these nov-els
is articulated as the object of desire for both the medieval or modern
women protagonist and also for the female reader. This is achieved by draw-
8 Often, these books include a short biography of the authors in their back covers where
they are consistently presented as happy wives and mothers as well as successful
professional writers.
9 Tom Holt’s novel Who Is Afraid of Beowulf? (1988) also presents the adventures of
History lecturer Hildy Frederiksen who, in the company of a Vikng war-band, arrives in 20th
century Scotland. However, here the stress falls on parody and there are no sentimental
or erotic elements.
294 María José Gómez Calderón
ing on the identification character-reader across times –that is, by appealing
to what in the novels is presented as the eternal feminine that joins both fe-males,
and by assuming that women of all ages have to face the same kind
of problems with men, that is, the eternal masculine. The rhetorics of the
genre require that the narrator voices the female character’s perception of
the conflict, as it sides with the heroine in her quest to win the love of the
Viking. Heather Graham’s text The Viking’s Woman (1990) offers a very rep-resentative
instance of how the fascination with the dangerous Other be-comes
central to the economy of the narration. At this point on the story
Rhiannon, King Alfred’s niece and a brave and independent woman, refuses
marrying the Viking Eric, to whom she has been offered as a «peace bride»;
but in spite of her reluctance, the woman’s resistance is progressively won
over by the Viking’s sex-appeal:
She tried to scream, to deny, to disappear in the very air. With swift-rising
horror she brought her gaze back to his eyes and was startled by the hard
mockery and unrelenting pride within them. There was a strange and savage
beauty about the man . . . It was in the animal-like grace of his movement as
he came towards her . . . Trickles of flame danced down the length of her
spine as she felt his touch, bold and hard upon her . . . as she felt his eyes,
daggers that ripped into her, and pinned her soul as his body pinned her form.
«What shall I do first?» he inquired. «Beat you or rape you?»
«Let me go –»
. . . His breath warmed her lips and entered into her. She was filled with
his scent, curiously clean and strikingly masculine and as alarming as his
touch. (177)
The heroine’s subjective perspective on this situation of abuse of power
is built around a positive evaluation of the Viking’s masculinity in traditional
lines. His «strange and savage beauty,» «animal-like grace,» and «strikingly
masculine» and «alarming scent» are perceived by the female as threaten-ing
yet enticing, and even his «hard mockery and unrelenting pride» contrib-ute
to seduce her.
The maxim seems to be that loving a Viking is always risky and painful
because, although the heroine sees in him the perfect embodiment of pro-tective
masculinity, in the first place she must gain his love to be protected
from him. She should employ her womanly charms in the process that I would
define as the «taming of the Barbarian,» in which the male protagonist is civ-ilized
and transformed into an integrated member of his society by the agency
of sentimentalization. This is in fact the position voiced by Kate Ryan from
the on-line bookclub «Romantic Times,» the self-proclaimed «definitive wom-en’s
fiction guide»:
If these warriors were so monstrous, why do they appeal to us gentle
romance readers? Because Viking heroes are the epitome of the alpha male!
Romancing the Dark Ages: The Viking Hero in Sentimental Narrative 295
As much as we proclaim a desire for independence, we do indeed fantasize
about being dominated by a fierce barbarian (the right one anyway!). Alan Alda
may be an OK mate in the 20th century, but he wouldn’t make a very good
protector in the ninth or tenth century. Women love the fantasy of
domesticating the barbarian; there really is nothing like «taming» a wild beast.
Just ask any romance reader—she knows how it should be done! No matter
how fierce these warriors, there weren’t many women who could resist the
charms of these Scandinavian heroes. For like Odin (Viking God of War,
Wisdom and Poetry) they had the mind and body of a warrior but the heart
of a poet.
Importantly, the Viking must never lose his good looks and physical mag-netism,
as the difference between the romance and the «hot historical» lies
on the attention paid to the sexual encounters of the protagonists through
the narrative. However, sex is regarded as secondary to the emotional com-mitment
to the Viking, which demands that women renounce their independ-ence.
In turn the man should, paradoxically, give up the activities that define
his «Vikingness»; that is, he must forsake sailing away from home and fight-ing
battles, in order to be happily «tamed» into marriage and caring father-hood.
A very good example is that of Sandra Hill’s The Very Virile Viking (2003).
Here the gorgeous Viking Magnus Ericsson travels in time with his nine
children to 21st century California; there he seduces a contemporary wom-an,
Angela Abruzzi, whose life seems to be pointless since she divorced: her
professional career does not satisfy her, and her real vocation, running her
family’s vineyard and winery, the Blue Dragon, is thwarted by financial diffi-culties.
She falls in love with Magnus in spite of her modern woman’s prin-ciples.
The following scene takes place during one of their arguments on ac-count
on the Viking’s overprotective ways, as he risked his own life to defend
the Abruzzis’ lands:
Angela glared at Magnus, who gazed back at her with utter innocence...
«I love the Blue Dragon, but I never wanted you to put your life on the
line.»
«Some times a man must be a man.»
She rolled her eyes. Is there such as thing as an adorable male chau-vinist?
(293).
The Viking thus is molded on the traditional masculine role of protector of
the family and their property. Magnus’s quest would be educating his viking
children in the frame of American consumerism and being able to fulfill his
Californian lover’s expectations: marriage, having one more child with her, and
staying at home with his new family forever. This big family, interestingly,
provides an idealized contrast to contemporary nuclear ones also in its mul-ticultural
nature: two parents belonging to different historical periods, nine
296 María José Gómez Calderón
viking children and one more Californian-Viking baby, plus one great-grand-mother
of Italian descent, all of them happily living together in the vineyards
of Napa Valley. To a certain extent, this text is but an idyllic and at the same
time parodic revision of Falcon Crest, one of the most popular television series.
Both the sense of parody and intertextuality are relevant in a more re-cent
novels which relies on the success these viking romances have enjoyed
in the last decade. In Jackie Rose’s I’m a Viking and I Protest (2004), a con-temporary
American man of Norse origin, Karl Gustavsen, founds an anti-defamation
league and sues romance writer Rose Jacobson for presenting
Vikings as sexy rapists in her works; that is, for just writing the kind of novels
analyzed above. As can be appreciated, the name of the writer character is a
pun on the name of the author of this text, a strategy that underlines the
comic interaction between literature and reality. From language to plot, this
novel makes fun of all the conventions of the «hot historical.» To begin with,
Karl denounces Rose’s unfair presentation of the Viking in her best-seller
Ravished by Ragnar (significantly published by Orgazm Books), and he does
it within the context of the politically correct:
«A rape contest!» he exclaimed «And because they are talking about our
ancestors, they can get away with it. What if she had written about two Black
men or Hispanics or Jews holding a rape contest?» Having originally phrased
that mentally as «Black men or Jews or Hispanics,» he had hastily re-cast it
into alphabetical order to avoid implying that he had singled any one group
out for the dishonour. (3)
This novel problematizes its gender politics: it is the male protagonist
who deplores the practice of constructing Viking sexuality in aggressive
terms, and not only because it renders all Norsemen as potential sexual abus-ers,
but mainly because it creates a myth of sexual excellence about them
to which Karl is not sure he could respond. Thus, the love conflict certainly
appears, although not when the Viking tries to kidnap and seduce the resist-ant
lady, but when the lady tries to seduce the modern Viking in order to
avoid being sued by him. To continue with the parody, the relationship be-tween
the protagonists evolves into a crazy battle of the sexes with many
erotic episodes that ludicrously rewrite the typical scenes of the Viking ro-mance,
particularly when Karl finds out a magical medieval runestone that
enhances his sexual skills. But finally –we cannot forget this is a romance
that stands up to the formulae of the genre– the heroine falls in love with
her enemy. In one of the most comic passages of the novel an infatuated Rose,
just to please Karl, even takes into consideration changing the title of her
next novel, Enslaved by Eric, into Liberated by Leif, Equal to Olaf, or Engaged-
In-A-Full-Consensual-Relationship with Torvald. In the end, of course, Karl and
Rose get happily married as her prospective next novel, finally entitled Seized
by Swen, advances successfully.
Romancing the Dark Ages: The Viking Hero in Sentimental Narrative 297
As this analysis shows, the turn-of-the-millennium revisiting of such a
well-established image of masculinity as the Viking in popular genres has
changed this icon significantly. It has undergone a process of transformation
from Noble Savage and racial and nationalist icon to object of feminine de-sire,
a makeover which updates the archetype to modern standards. How-ever,
although initially this seems to challenge the conventions of romance,
its transgression is just superficial as it is operated within the limits of the
traditional definition of gender roles. No longer a maverick raider and threat-ening
«Other,» but a Family Man and integrated member of the community,
the new Viking of these novels has become a defender of conservative val-ues
as long as issues as male authority and the father’s function as bread-winner
and protector of family and property are not questioned. The Viking
is never molded on alternative roles which, as for example the Nurturing
Father or the Feminist Man, can offer new possibilities for the definition of
gender relations in postmodern societies; as a sentimental hero the Viking
of romance, despite its pretended modernity, represents a backlash to the
contemporary discourses of masculinity as well as to that of feminism.
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